BEFORE THE SEOUL OLYMPICS WE WOULD TAKE DOWN A SOUTH KOREAN AIRLINER

For South Korea, the Games were a triumph; a milestone of the country’s successful transition from a dirtpoor military dictatorship.

After the Seoul Olympics, Juan Samaranch, president of the IOC, would boast that “the Olympic Games were a major factor behind the rapid democratization of the Republic of Korea.”

Samaranch may have been a former Spanish fascist, but he was right: The Olympics had been awarded to a militaristic South Korea that had never once experienced a peaceful transition of power. Only months before the opening ceremonies, in fact, hundreds had been killed in street clashes between South Korean forces and student demonstrators.

Ever since the Seoul Olympic flame was extinguished, however, they’ve experienced six consecutive free elections.

The exact opposite was true of their northern neighbour. North Korea had been deftly outmanoeuvred by their nemesis and abandoned by their allies.

The pre-1988 North Korea had been plenty oppressive, but 1988 marked the point at which Pyongyang began to bring their people to entirely new thresholds of suffering.

As scholar Sergey Radchenko wrote in a 2012 analysis of the 1988 games, “what followed … was a nuclear crisis, international isolation and a devastating famine.”